Reykjavík Grapevine - 28.08.2009, Qupperneq 46

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 13 — 2009 The Longest Poem in the World can be found at
www.longestpoemintheworld.com
Poetry | Eiríkur Norðdahl Books | ReviewBooks | Review
Three hundred and fifty
thousand, seven hundred
and fourteen verses. Twenty
lines per verse, and every
line rhymes with the following one.
That’s how long Andrei Gheorghe’s
poem is. It’s almost four times longer
than the Mahabharata of ancient In-
dia. Forty times longer than The Iliad
and The Odyssey combined and twenty
times longer than Dante’s Divine Com-
edy.
It’s (appropriately) called The Lon-
gest Poem in the World and it’s com-
posed by aggregating real-time public
twitter updates and selecting those
that rhyme. Every day the poem grows
longer by about 4000 verses. Some of
it sounds inane (“Playing hide and seek
at the park. :) / Waiting on Heather and
Mark!”) A lot of it sounds funny (“im
hoping that its easy and i can finish it
quickly / They made porcupine love, so
stiff and stuck and prickly” and “Had a
great gala evening and won lots of priz-
es / And also simulating penis sizes”).
But most if it’s actually fantastically
mundane. Boring. Stupid. People
waiting for their favourite TV show to
start. People twittering about God dur-
ing the sermon. People announcing
their hangovers like victories. People
regurgitating sayings and Oscar Wilde
quotes.
Gheorghe’s has called it a collective
consciousness. And in effect it is—it
brews an essence of human thought
and if you read it for too long you’ll be
moved. You’ll get angry. You’ll feel ev-
ery ounce of wasted life like somebody
was yanking your haemorrhoids with a
tire-iron.
But perhaps this is humanity. Per-
haps this is the essence of our being,
making The Longest Poem in the
World one of the most relevant pieces of
art around. One that mirrors (a part of)
reality in a one to one correlation. One
that, if read in its entirety, would anni-
hilate the little that may still be left of
our souls and leave us completely aware
of the emptiness that envelopes our
lives.
The poem consists of what hun-
dreds of thousands (if not millions) of
people deemed most worthy to commu-
nicate to the world and/or their friends
at a given moment (in real-time). And
it rhymes, which somehow accentuates
the inherent nihilism of this deranged
and disturbing poem.
I don’t blame twitter. The results
would probably have been the same (or
worse) if the material had been small-
talk. In person. Off line. And I’m not
sure my own statuses and/or small-talk
would’ve been any more interesting.
Yet perhaps the sensation it evokes is
false—not based in the reality it stems
from. Perhaps the world is not as empty
and meaningless as The Longest Poem
in the World makes it seem. Perhaps
these lines of poetry — these bits of
small-talk — are beautiful and filled
with meaning when experienced in
their natural habitat.
The soldiers in Homer’s Odyssey
were never turned into swine. Not re-
ally, I mean. We suspend disbelief and
allow Homer to take us there, and so
the soldiers indeed turn into swine.
Gheorghe has in some way (perhaps)
turned an innocent humanity into
swine, and just maybe that does not de-
tract an ounce of worth from the poem
itself (at least if we allow for the artistry
of Gheorghe’s poem to be purely con-
ceptual—as formally it’s mostly horren-
dous). This non-relation to reality might
also make it the perfect representative
for reality, in Georgia O’Keefe’s words:
“Nothing is less real than realism. It
is only by selection, by elimination, by
emphasis that we get at the real mean-
ing of things.”
And so regretfully I must admit that
(once again!) I cannot yet say whether or
not there is meaning in the world.
Oh, the nihilism!
By the time adults
have children,
they’re often out
of touch with kid
culture and need
help figuring out
what to do all day with their three-foot
wonders. Even once things get going
reasonably well, it’s easy to get into a rut
and forget about fun things that are just
around the corner but missing from our
mental map of town.
Parents need a regular stream of
new ideas for their kids. These can
come through word of mouth, seren-
dipity, the newspaper, or looking in the
telephone book. They can even come
from a guidebook to things that kids
and parents can do. There are already
guidebooks like this for many cities.
Now there is one to Reykjavík, called
Children’s Reykjavík / Reykjavík bar-
nanna.
Children’s Reykjavík is small and
thick, with over 400 nicely designed
spiral-bound pages, perhaps forty of
which are given over to advertising. The
rest is divided into ten chapters that are
labelled with colours and numbers but
no titles, so to find a particular subject
you have to hunt a bit in the table of con-
tents or index. The content is bilingual,
with English usually on the left side
of each opening and Icelandic on the
right.
There’s a lot of information in here.
The book covers a really good range of
topics, including some that can be hard
to find out about. For example, the book
tells you where you can take your child
for a haircut or family photograph,
where you can hold a pre-packaged
birthday party, where to find art and
music courses, and where kids can go
to summer camp.
The book also includes a few pro-
files of semi-prominent Reykjavík par-
ents, who describe how they spend their
time with their kids in ways that range
from honest to slightly saccharine.
The book’s English translation and
proofreading is imperfect—not enough
to spoil the information, but enough to
make reading it a bit awkward (in one
great blooper, we’re told about an astrol-
ogy club which meets at the telescope in
Seltjarnarnes.) Also, the English usu-
ally translates only a part of the origi-
nal Icelandic text, making the English
entries markedly shorter than their Ice-
landic counterparts across the page.
The reviews themselves are most
helpful when they appear to ref lect
the authors’ honest opinion. At other
times, they have a bit of a promotional
feel to it and use marketing language
sometimes seemingly derived from the
brochures of the places reviewed. For
example, on page 188 we are told that
“Adams Kids aims to provide you with a
unique and rewarding shopping experi-
ence that we’re sure you’ll never forget.”
Children’s Reykjavík doesn’t tell us
whether some of the listings were paid
for, but the recommendation for KFC
in the restaurant listings sticks out as
possibly related to the KFC advertise-
ment a few pages away. All guidebooks
sit somewhere on a continuum from be-
ing entirely promotional to entirely in-
dependent. This book is perhaps a little
too far towards the promotional side for
my taste, although not so far to render
most of its recommendations untrust-
worthy.
Overall, Children’s Reykjavík is
a useful but f lawed book. It could be
a lot better. But it’s nice that it exists.
And rather than criticizing the English
translation, we should probably be glad
that there’s any English in the book
at all! I’d say that paying 2.990 kr. for
it (2.691 kr. at Bóksala stúdenta) is a
worthwhile investment if you are fairly
new to town and want to spend a cou-
ple hours socializing yourself into the
world of children’s activities in Reykja-
vík.
Children’s Reykjavík is already out
of date, like any guidebook. Some of
the places mentioned in the book have
already closed, like Hreyfiland and Salt-
félagið. So for those who know the city
already, I wouldn’t recommend buying
this book for reference. If you need, say,
the opening hours or telephone num-
ber for Húsdýragarðurinn, it’s easier to
look on the web. But if you’re just look-
ing for new ideas and inspiration, f lip-
ping through this book is a fine idea.
Like other guidebooks in the twenty-
first century, though, this one is caught
in a set of Internet-age paradoxes. Why
pay to own a little brick of colourfully
printed dead tree when you can not only
read it at the library but also get the
same information, albeit unfiltered, on-
line? And this book could be produced
more cheaply and updated more regu-
larly, and could reach a larger audience
more quickly, if it was available on the
web for free. But then there might not
be any revenue stream associated with
putting the information together.
For now, the publishers of this book
stuck with the old style of embargoing
their content, restricting it to those
who pay for a copy that’s printed on
paper, and paying their bills with the
revenue from these sales as well as con-
ventional print advertising. This model
still works, or at least inspires hope in
prospective authors. But for how much
longer? When someone eventually fig-
ures out how to fit books like Children’s
Reykjavík into a workable web-based
business model, it may free guidebook
authors to focus more on providing
good content and less on the economics
of selling paper copies.
- IAN WATSON
Trolls´Cathedral
(original Icelandic
title Tröllakirkja) is
the first part of an
acclaimed trilogy by
author Ólafur Gun-
narsson (the two other
being Potter´s Field and Winter Journey,
respectively). The novel was published
in 1992 and nominated for the Icelandic
Literary Prize the same year. The story
takes place in 1950´s Reykjavík and tells
the tale of architect Sigurbjörn Helgas-
on who has high dreams for building a
massive and imposing cathedral on top
of Skólavörðuholt (where Hallgrímskirk-
ja church now stands) that will echo the
shapes of the Icelandic landscape. He
starts his own construction firm along
with (and mostly financed by) his friend
Guðbrandur, who is a master carpenter.
Their first project is for the first fran-
chised department store in Reykjavík.
But things do not go according to plan,
and Sigurbjörn soon finds his world
crumbling as his marriage starts failing,
his family life falls to pieces, the debts
pile up, and yet Sigurbjörn strives to
keep up appearances.
The novel has received almost unani-
mously good reviews, both in Iceland
and abroad. It paints a very clear and
interesting picture of Iceland´s and
Reykjavík´s growing pains as the
Icelandic society rapidly changed and
the capital transformed from town to
city. The story of Sigurbjörn is an epic
tale of one man´s downfall, and his fate
follows a universal theme that could
surely be translated and understood in
any culture.
That said, I have to admit that although
Sigurbjörn’s fate is tragic, I did not feel
for him very much. Perhaps it is one of
the traits of the epic that the narra-
tive seems to hold the reader at arm’s
length, creating distance between read-
er and characters. But maybe it was just
because I found Sigurbjörn´s character
to be self-centred, nasty and extremely
dislikeable. And the same goes for other
characters in the novel. Even when
Sigurbjörn´s obnoxious eleven-year-old
son is sexually assaulted and beaten, I
could have cared less. The only charac-
ter I felt remotely sympathetic towards
was Guðbrandur, who is truly a victim of
Sigurbjörn´s extravagant dreams.
But perhaps it is this distance from the
characters that gives the underlying
narrative the universal appeal that it
has. Rather than being a tale of one
man’s ruin, Trolls´ Cathedral has wider
connotations that give it fable-like
qualities.
Bottom line: A vivid picture of Iceland ś
growing pains in the 1950 ś.
- HILDUR KNÚTSDÓTTIR
Trolls´ Cathedral
Ólafur Gunnarsson
English translation by David McDuff
and Jill Burows.
JPV Publishers Reykjavík 2008.
Children’s Reykjavík
Salka, 2008